A piece of fossilised vomit, dating back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth, has been discovered in Denmark, the Museum of East Zealand has said.
The find was made by a local amateur fossil hunter on the Cliffs of Stevns, a Unesco-listed site south of Copenhagen.
While out on a walk, Peter Bennicke found unusual fragments, which turned out to be pieces of sea lily, in a piece of chalk.
He took the fragments to a museum for examination, which dated the vomit to the end of the Cretaceous period around 66million years ago.
According to experts, the vomit is made up of at least two different species of sea lily, which were probably eaten by a fish that threw up the parts it could not digest.
“This type of find … is considered very important when reconstructing past ecosystems because it provides important information about which animals were eaten by which,” the museum said in a press release on Monday.
Paleontologist Jesper Milan hailed the discovery as “truly an unusual find”, adding it helped explain the relationships in the prehistoric food chain.
“Sea lilies are not a particularly nutritious diet, as they consist mainly of calcareous plates held together by a few soft parts,” he said.
“But here is an animal, probably some kind of fish, that 66m years ago ate sea lilies that lived at the bottom of the Cretaceous sea and regurgitated the skeletal parts.”